Answer: “Yes, he is.” The Question: “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”

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PGage

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May 18, 2020, 3:14:56 AM5/18/20
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Ben Smith in this NYT Piece gets squarely at an issue that has been discussed indirectly in several ways on this list over last few years. I strongly recommend reading in its entirety (a few fair use excerpt ps follow below). 

I think it gets to the real threat to the credibility of television news, much more than the (really, relatively rare, as a fraction of all stories reported) straight errors in reporting like the one recently about William Barr by MTP. They should be rare, but factual mistakes will happen, and when they do they should be owned up to promptly and corrected. When that happens, the real damage is minimal. A bigger problem is a habit of allowing a juicy and simple narrative to trump complicated, less interesting evidence based reporting. It is this drive for compelling story-telling (and ratings), more than ideological bias, that drives bad television news reporting at all TV news shops (other than Fox, which is Equally and promiscuously open to all possible sources of bad reporting). 

No major tv news organization (even Fox) is as mendacious and disdainful of the truth as Trump, but the culture of the “Trump Resistance”, as manifested on social media and the moist holes under dirty rocks in the deeper recesses of the hard core Bernie Sanders death-eater culture (does anyone here monitor “Crystal Ball?) has left a mark on some parts of main stream media. 

Nowhere is this more true than in the work of Ronan Farrow. It’s not that Farrow is always wrong (Weinstein and Lauer are bad actors, corroborated by multiple sources, outside of Farrow). But he is sometimes dead wrong (e.g. his Michael Cohen story) and other times exaggerated claims and fudges holes in his evidence with passion and flair, rather than candor. This is not the case of an overworked reported on tight deadline making occasional mistakes that he later corrects. It is millennial gonzo infotainment, where the reporters empathy for the story seems to carry more weight than actual evidence. 

While his best selling book accuses NBC News of a conspiracy to kill his Weinstein story out of fear Weinstein would out Lauer (a claim the crucial elements of which are not supported with evidence in the book), NBC’s refusal to air Ronan’s story is probably more a credit than liability to their credibility; though as Smith notes, the real sin there was a major news organization entrusting such a big story to such a green reporter, and then not supporting him better with experienced supervision when he got in over his head.

Those who really want to be part of a meaningful “Resistance Movement“, whether to Trumpism, Predatory Patriarchy or Late Stage Capitalism, are better off opposing them not just ideologically, but also methodologically. We are better than them not when we can be more successful than they are with the same dishonest tools, but when we do our best to stay as close to the facts as possible (and yes, even taking into account human subjectivity, there are facts that we can more or less successfully approximate).


“Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting....he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize....

...if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.“


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Dave Sikula

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May 18, 2020, 6:07:56 AM5/18/20
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Farrow lost any credibility for me when he went after his alleged father and ignored any evidence that cleared him in favor of concentrating on rumor, innuendo, and the poison his mother had injected into many of her children's minds.

--Dave Sikula

On Monday, May 18, 2020 at 12:14:56 AM UTC-7, PGage wrote:
Ben Smith in this NYT Piece gets squarely at an issue that has been discussed indirectly in several ways on this list over last few years. I strongly recommend reading in its entirety (a few fair use excerpt ps follow below). 


Steve Timko

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May 18, 2020, 7:07:06 AM5/18/20
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With Weinstein, Farrow was a David who slew Goliath. Since then the quality of his villains has declined. At least twice I saw him having to explain why his target's actions were bad. He ran out of obvious targets. It reminds me of Siskel and Ebert saying the quality of Bond films was determined by the caliber of the villains. Farrow had third-rate villains he tried to build up into Goldfingers.
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Kevin M.

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May 18, 2020, 10:29:49 PM5/18/20
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Farrow’s biggest gaffe as a journalist was his very personal attack on Woody Allen. I’m not arguing the validity of his claims, but no real reporter can maintain objectivity in such a case. He would’ve been better served offering himself as a source for a different journalist. 

That said, every journalist makes errors... lots of errors. What matters is when they occur, how are they dealt with. So far Farrow has dealt with them better than the average. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

PGage

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May 18, 2020, 11:55:00 PM5/18/20
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I agree that the most important thing is how they deal with errors. I disagree That Farrow does this better than most. Indeed I think he deals with it worse than most at main stream news outlets. He has failed to even admit several of his mistakes, much less retract and correct them.

To be fair, I paste below the link to Farrow’s Twitter rebuttal to Smith:

Also, I deleted last night a longish paragraph from an already too long post Noting that Smith himself is hardly the best situated to pose as the ultimate arbiter of responsible journalism. Who knows what personal and professional rivalries bubble underneath the surface of his NYT piece, as they both inhabit a similar space. Smith may have evolved Buzzfeed beyond simple clickbait, but he retains that skill, and it looks like his piece got the Times Buzz Feed worthy clicks today.

So my point is not that everything, or even most things, Farrow has worked on is BS (and that’s not even Smith’s point). It’s that, in journalism, just as being wrong is not the worst sin, being right is not good enough. It’s the process that gives journalists credibility. 

The classic example is in the film “All the President’s Men”. Ben Bradlee reads an early proposed W & B story tying the break-in to the WH:

BRADLEE: “You haven't got it.(before they can reply) A librarian and a secretary say Hunt looked at a book. (shakes his head) Not good enough.“


In the end, the problem is not so much Farrow (young reporters eager to make a Mae for themselves have always been thus) it is the lack of a strong editorial hand, or maybe an environment in which the young reporter can just take his marbles and go shopping for a place that will let him publish with less than adequate support.

Kevin M.

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May 19, 2020, 6:54:32 PM5/19/20
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And now, for the opinion literally nobody asked for:



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Kevin M. (RPCV)

PGage

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May 19, 2020, 9:59:51 PM5/19/20
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Reason #9 why it is important to follow good journalistic practices: Sleazeballs like Matt Lauer will use lapses to try to rehabilitate themselves.


The main benefit from reading Laura’s piece (which I strongly warn against unless you are able to shower soon after; it’s like sitting under a drunk who just wants to vomit all over you) is that it underlines how good an actor Steve Carell is. That Apple TV show was problematic, but Carell really captures the clueless, desperate, defensive self-blindness manifested by Lauer here.


It should go without saying, but I will note here for the record, that Lauer was not fired because of reporting by Ronan Farrow. Lauer’s friends, and people who made a lot of money off him, fired him after talking directly to the woman who reported his misconduct, and conducting their own investigation, revealing a pattern of sexual misconduct. 


Lauer uses the Smith piece in the NYT to imply his own mistake was simply having consensual sex with a work colleague, and all other reports of misconduct are just bad journalism. But other journalists reported a long history of sexual misconduct, including the NYT. Whether or not Lauer is guilty of the crime of rape that night in Sochi, and of every specific piece of bad behavior he has ever been accused of, is a more complicated question. But I think it is well established by now that he did a hell of a lot more than just have a consensual sexual affair with a co-worker.


Just one example: Lauer makes a meal here of whether his assistant ever took a woman to a nurse after an encounter in his office. He accuses Farrow of not fact checking this with his assistant, and claims if he had, the assistant would have said She never took anyone to a nurse. Whatever. This is like being accused of murdering someone in a supermarket and then stealing an apple, and spending all your time showing how you would never steal an apple. Here is what the NYT wrote soon after Lauer was fired:


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/nbc-matt-lauer.html?referringSource=articleShare


“One complaint came from a former employee who said Mr. Lauer had summoned her to his office in 2001, locked the door and sexually assaulted her. She provided her account to The New York Times but declined to let her name be used.


She told The Times that she passed out and had to be taken to a nurse. She said that she felt helpless because she didn’t want to lose her job, and that she didn’t report the encounter at the time because she felt ashamed...


The woman said Mr. Lauer asked her to unbutton her blouse, which she did. She said the anchor then stepped out from behind his desk, pulled down her pants, bent her over a chair and had intercourse with her. At some point, she said, she passed out with her pants pulled halfway down. She woke up on the floor of his office, and Mr. Lauer had his assistant take her to a nurse.”


Okay, so maybe the person who carried the title “Assistant to Matt Lauer” is not the one who actually took her to the nurse. That detail changes nothing.


Lauer also enjoys showing that the claim that he had a button he could push to close and lock his door has been debunked. I review this here only because it illustrates his creepy, sophistic style of argument. He did have a button that closed his door, it appears it did lock the door from the outside, but did not lock the door from the inside, which some stories may have implied (see the full button story in:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/05/11/just-how-did-matt-lauers-famous-desk-button-work)


That last is not completely irrelevant, but if the allegation is that the most powerful man in the building ordered a female subordinate to strip and have sex with him after pushing a button that automatically shut and locked his office door, the defense that “well, she could have left the room if she wanted to” is not exactly exculpatory.


Matt Lauer was a creepy, habitual sexual predator who deserved to be fired and the public humiliation that followed. That fact makes it more, not less, important that reporting about him, and alleged related episodes (like Farrow’s claim that Weinstein blackmailed NBC into shutting down Farrow’s story with a threat to out Lauer) be solid, rather than shoddy.


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